An early detection test for pancreatic cancer: Jack Andraka at TED2013

When Jack Andraka was 15 years old, he didn’t know what a pancreas was. Now, this teenager has created a test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer that, while still in the preliminary stages, looks promising. So how did he become an health innovator?

Andraka tells the story during Session 6 of TED2013.

“Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing, you just want to learn everything you can to make sense of it all?” he asks.

For him, that moment came when a family friend, who’d been like an uncle to him, passed away from pancreatic cancer. In Andraka’s Googling, he discovered startling statistics about this kind of cancer — that in 85% of cases, pancreatic cancer is diagnosed late when a person only has a 2% chance of survival. As Andraka explains on the stage, this is because the same…